Until Nov. 4, 2008, the Arizona senator could cherish the hope that his future depended more on New Hampshire and Florida voters than on those back home. But with his loss to Barack Obama in the presidential race, McCain's Arizona electorate reclaimed its career-ending power over him.

His
victory in the Arizona Republican primary Tuesday
proves that his home-state appeal will live to fight another day. How his role in the Senate and the national Republican Party will evolve if, as expected, he wins a fifth Senate term this November is less clear.

In tone and emphasis, the McCain who won on Tuesday isn't the irreverent underdog who became a news media darling after beating George W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary in 2000. Also gone is the maverick who irritated his party's base by reaching across the aisle on key issues for much of his time in the Senate.

Can McCain revert to his identity circa 2006 as a consensus builder who bridges partisan divides? Times are different; maybe McCain is too. For a glimpse at how his party’s politics have changed, look no further than the senator’s recent shifts on two of his signature issues.

Immigration: In 2006, McCain joined forces with Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., to lead the effort to pass reform legislation that included a path to legalization for illegal immigrants.

The McCain-Kennedy bill allowed illegal immigrants to become permanent legal U.S. residents, and ultimately American citizens, if they'd worked for at least three of the previous five years, paid a $2,000 fine, and met certain other conditions.

Obama charged that McCain had “abandoned his courageous stance” from 2006.

McCain denies that he has changed, blaming a biased news media. "I know how popular it is for the Eastern press to paint me as having changed positions. That's not true," he said in an interview with Politics Daily's Jill Lawrence last week. "I know they're going to continue to say it. It's fundamentally false."

Many in the news media "would love to see John McCain, the nominee of the Republican Party, in serious trouble," he added.

Campaign finance: McCain, the former crusader for limits on campaign spending spent more than $20 million to defeat his primary challenger, former Rep. J.D. Hayworth.

Dan Schnur, McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign communications director, said he was surprised by “the sheer magnitude of force” McCain used to crush Hayworth.

“From a distance, it appears that the senator’s advisors were very intent on not letting him be surprised by an insurgent the way other candidates have been this year,” he said.

In 2002, McCain scored one of his biggest successes when Congress passed — and President Bush signed — the McCain-Feingold law which banned unlimited corporate and labor union funding of political party-building efforts. The law also restricted "issue ads" which targeted candidates — adding to the existing ban on corporations and unions running ads calling for election or defeat of a specific candidate.

Last January, the Supreme Court struck down the part of the law dealing with political ads, ruling that corporations have a First Amendment right to buy electioneering ads.

"Political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it," wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority. This freedom, the majority said, even applies to corporations.

Despite the mortal wound inflicted on one of his trademark pieces of legislation, McCain had only a terse response, saying he was “disappointed” but that the ruling left intact the ban on unlimited direct corporate funding of candidates and parties.

Election year star?As McCain has dedicated his efforts to fending off the primary challenge from the right, his time spent helping other Republicans has been limited, and will likely continue to be.

McCain’s value as an endorser or surrogate may be confined to places such as New England where he retains popularity. He went to New Hampshire last March to campaign for Republican Senate contender Kelly Ayotte, and he endorsed Scott Brown’s Senate bid in Massachusetts last January.

But party dynamics elsewhere make him less effective. In Florida, for example, it was Gov. Charlie Crist who helped push McCain to victory in the 2008 GOP presidential contest. Now McCain finds himself unable to return the favor.

Faced with a challenge from conservative Marco Rubio, Crist exited the GOP to run as an independent Senate candidate. Despite his friendship with Crist, McCain said he’d support Rubio: “I'm a Republican and I support Republican candidates.”

And, looking forward to the 2012 Republican presidential contest, it's difficult to see much of a role for McCain.

“It's unlikely that his endorsement would be helpful in the 2012 primary campaign,” Claremont McKenna College political scientist John Pitney said. “Very few Republicans came out of the 2008 campaign thinking more highly of him. Conservatives still distrusted him. Moderates were disappointed by his shifts to the right. Professionals were appalled by the disarray in his campaign.”

'Important decisions lie ahead'
Now with a fifth term in the Senate likely, McCain will be free to revert to his role as a Capitol Hill “lifer” — he began there in the late 1970s as a Navy liaison to the Senate.

“McCain's greatest strength lies in national security issues. His most important role will consist of his work on the Armed Services Committee, particularly if the GOP gains a majority and he becomes the chairman,” said Pitney. “Important decisions lie ahead on Afghanistan, terrorism, and crises yet unknown.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, among others, notes that the Pentagon’s one-fifth share of federal outlays will be under severe pressure in the years ahead.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that defense outlays will grow by only 1 percent a year over the next eight years, compared with nearly 6 percent annual growth for Medicare spending.

As senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, or maybe someday its chairman, McCain will have a decisive voice in where troops are deployed, and what ships and drones are built.

One example of the hard decisions McCain will help make, the topic of an Aug. 4 hearing before an Armed Services subcommittee: the replacement for Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines.

"We're working hard to get the cost of that down, but even if we're really successful, those are still going to be about $5 billion apiece," Gates said a few weeks ago.

McCain’s future role on immigration is, at best, unclear.

“It's hard to see how McCain — or anyone else — can build consensus on comprehensive immigration reform,” Pitney said. “Such a task would take patience, diplomacy, and a deep reservoir of friendship on both sides. John McCain is not famous for any of those things.”

Schnur said with the likelihood of more Republicans in the Senate next year McCain might have an opening to act as middleman, the role he played in 2005 as part of the “Gang of 14” along with Democrats such as Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas to avert filibusters of judicial nominees.

“When you’re one of 40, there’s a limit to how much practical impact he can have,” Schnur said. “If you’re one of 48 or 49, there are other roles that are available. In a more evenly divided Senate, the possibility remains for him to play a different type of role than he has as one of a strongly outnumbered minority.”

Corruption, intolerance
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, could provide a role model for McCain on how to resume a Senate career after losing a presidential election. In addition to his job as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry has been one of those leading the effort to pass a bill to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

But unlike Kerry, McCain once built a reputation as the righteous scold of those in his party whom he sees as corrupt or intolerant.

“To stand up and take on the forces of evil, that’s my job,” he said in 2000 as he denounced evangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance.”

McConnell, a Bush supporter, put it aptly in 2000 when he said McCain “would have to do a lot of work to convince a lot of Republican base voters that he is one of us — because the issues he has emphasized in recent years have all been Democratic issues.”

That’s what made some Democrats and some in the news media love McCain.

Some even fantasized about him being their 2004 presidential nominee. In 2002, in the liberal magazine The New Republic, writer Jonathan Chait urged McCain to run for president against Bush as a Democrat, citing his opposition to Bush’s 2001 tax cuts and calling McCain “the most popular and effective champion of the Democratic Party’s values.”

Today, that sounds like farce or fiction. But it was written before the invasion of Iraq and while Obama was still an obscure state senator in Illinois. It’s a reminder of how much has changed, both in McCain and in his former admirers.

Video: Voters side with incumbents in primaries

Closed captioning of: Voters side with incumbents in primaries

>>let us
begin with the dramatic primaries across the country.
kelly
o'donnell following all the overnight action for us.
kelly
, good morning.

>> reporter: good morning, matt. what we expected to tell you today was that
john mccain
scored a big win here in arizona. that did happen. what we didn't think we'd be talking about is the influence of
sarah palin
in her home
state of alaska
. e threw her weight behind a candidate that was very little kno known. she went against someone who was ahead in the polls the whole way through, someone she has a strong background with, a rivalry, if you want to call it, and now trailing is a two-term republican senator.

>>what i think they're saying is, look, alaska has to take a new direction.

>> reporter: miller is a former judge and a
tea party
conservative who took on alaska and
washington
establishment and
lisa murkowski
. palin beat her father before.

>>he has the backbone to confront obama's radical agenda. by contrast
lisa murkowski
has voted with the democrats more than any republican up for re-election this year.

>> reporter: trading in the label vulnerable incumbent for victorious republican nominee,
john mccain
soundly beat back the
tea party
threat of former congressman
j.d. hayworth
. mccain tempered his success with a pledge to prove he's heard voters' anger at
washington
.

>>i will do my best to prove worthy of the honor. i have never and will never take your support for granted or feel i am entitled to your trust without earning it.

>> reporter: a disappointed hayworth had hammered mccain on immigration and pushed the senator to move hard right. also in arizona political novice
benquayle
won his first race for congress. his father, the former vice president
dan quayle
, vented anger monday over rival businessman's devastating ads.

>>news reports link
benquayle
to a raunchy website.

>> reporter: benquayle
admitted he had written about local nightlife but called it fictional satire.

>>is this the type of behavior we want?

>> reporter: dan quayle
wrote to supporters, i have never in my 35 years of politics seb such an ugly, slanderous assault in the closing days of a campaign against a fellow republican. in florida a democratic
political family
is celebrating. miami congressman
kendrick meek
won big taking the democratic senate primary. son of a former congresswoman, meek defeated billionaire jeff greene.

>>i am here. i'm prepared to work for every vote in the
state of florida
need it be democrat, reamian or independent.

>>i am running for the
u.s. senate
because i think
washington
is wrong.

>> reporter: so the
washington senate
race is -- the
florida senate
race is about those establishment people, people in office already. but here's the surprise again. florida's governor's race shows an outsider, wealthy
rick scott
, poured $50 million to win the republican nomination for governor. he beat the state's attorney general. so depending on states. depending on candidates. there is that anti-incumbent wave and a little bit of room for the outsiders, too, with a few incumbents holding on. matt?